Phenomenal. I could easily see this as a game in my steam library :wink:

Awesome game !

Great graphics, Super cool!

Nice graphics and great use of the songs! The read weapon is may be to strong compare to the yellow one. The end of third level is really hard (which is good). I had fun, good entry overall!

The visuals of the game were stunning, and the music fits in really well. Gameplay is smooth, but the only issue I had was the shooting felt kinda wobbly/clunky/out of my control. The way I would fix it is maybe make the ship move faster and also make sure the shots don't have a tilt to them, and instead fire straight ahead. Other than that, for something made in 3 days, really good job.

Those graphics *-*, the gameplay's super cool as much. I loved being a minigum super laser ship xD

The graphics are the best I've seen so far. Doesn't really feel like a rhythm game, though. Mostly because only the enemies really do something with the rhythm, from the player's perspective it's just a generic Shoot-'em-Up.
Had a blast playing!

Super cool ! the gameplay is so smooth, and the graphics are great ! GG :v:

Amazing! It honestly makes me feel bad for giving the games I've tried out prior such good ratings :smirk: Were the songs manually mapped or was it done via some analytical algorithm like Beat Hazard/Audiosurf? The only thing I missed was mouse ship control but I can live without it.

Hey ! Glad you enjoyed it :D
@MoffKalast For the songs, we used the BPM of the songs for the enemy's movements.
And for their spawns we used the intensity of the music. ( So it could work with any song, we just need the BPM of it )

For the linux users out there: keyboard didn't work for me in windowed, but in fulscreen it works fine when using wine. This game looks amazingly polished.

really awesome! some said red weapon was too op compared to yellow, but imo it fired too slow preferred yellow! I think I would of liked it even more if your movement was constrained to the same hex columns as the mobs and you could only move on beat - i'd also love it if mobs died on beat and played a snare or something! but really strong entry, really enjoyed, nice!

Holy hell. This game is absolutely 10/10. Graphics are great. Music is super nice. The mechanics. Wow. Deserves to win this ludum dare. Insane man. I am so impressed. wow

Beat Hazard but with a normal BEAT feeling,

the graphics is good, I like it, pretty acid!

Also take a look to my review here at twitch.com/rodancheg

what an awesome game! Great rythm feeling, great graphic design (those explosions!) and great tracks (love Madeon) XD

Very polished, complete feeling game! Great graphics, great gameplay, great concept.

Such a shame that you didn't make the music, this would have been the whole package! As it is, fun game, a lot of my viewers were very impressed!

I love shoot's em up and i love good electro music ... so i love this game

This is incredible! You could add a few more songs and enemies, and sell this!

Stunning visuals, juicy and pleasant! The gameplay is smooth, game well polished. Best i've seen so far, strong 5 stars!

Please make a WebGL version.

Amazing graphics and gameplay! Hurts my eyes in a good way. Fantastic job!

Would love a macOS build. Or at least mark the zip on Itch as Windows ;)
Screenshots look great, seems like you really nailed the particle effects!

oh wow, that's sooo SHINY) I love this style very much! also concept is nice) great job!

Very beautiful game! If the music wasn't made by somebody else, this would have been the top game on my favourites so far. Great job nevertheless. Particle physics are pretty and everything is working beautifully! Well Done!

Very cool game. I'm like how you make environment changing, to the song bpm. Very very, incredible game, great job.

@derek-wilson Sorry, I marked the zip on Itch as windows so people will know now :x
We'll try to make a macOS build but none of us has a mac to test it so.. ><

WOW THAT TITLE SONG <3


Likes
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Trancelike EDM with a really good vibe.
SUPER POLISHED LOOKS. Damn, I will be making that polish a priority for my next jam. So satisfying.
Really relaxing shooter game play, I enjoyed it a lot.
The pacing is fantastic in many places.

Ideas
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Would be nice if the rhythm also affected my own shooting. This could be an awesome game with rhythm changes and polyrhythms (yeah dubstep)

Gist
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Really enjoyed this one, and I am keeping it open just to enjoy the music and visuals on my TV.

Very pretty game and lovely audio! Good polish I could imagine paying for this on the store.

If you get chance check out our game Mechasnek :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/mechasnek

Visually impressive, and fun to play. I don't feel like the rhythm aspect of the theme was strongly represented however.

Such a great job, increidble game, can be in my steam library for sure. GOOD JOB!

This game is awesome. From the detail in the scene transitions (even the exit button has a smooth fadeout) to the particle effects The polish is like that of a paid product. The movement is fun and feels snapy. I thought about making a rhythm game too but I dont no how to sync up the music to any game mechanics but you guys did an amazing job. My music isn't as good, but if you'd like to check out my game here's the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/yum-some

never seen anything like this. probably the best I have seen. You should check my team's out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/platscii

@Diblow Cool, I can test it out on macOS if you'd like. Feel free to shoot me a tweet @dwils if you make a build.
Congrats on finishing the game!

Man. Go for steam. I would by it right now! This game is so well sync that when I got some laggs from recording a video of it for some friends of mine, the music and ships were still laggy-synchronized. AWESOME. I don't know how you pulled that off, but I had a blast! The first song is my favorite though. At first I was like "It's a shame the player ship isn't synchronized with the music somehow". But like 30sec later when the beat kick off, you synchronize your ship with the music unconsciously! Best game I've played so far and maybe even in a jam. 5/5. You nailed it.

Looks and sounds great, obviously! Lots of juice and feels good. As some others have said I'd love to see the rhythm aspect reflected more in the gameplay rather than just the visuals and enemy patterns.

Wow, this whole game is just amazing. Very polished already, you guys add a feature of uploading your own songs and some more enemies and guns and you have a finished product. Enjoyed this a lot!

I felt like I was at a party, with loud lights and loud sound, just lacking the beer lol. Good job

Nice !

(no need more words :smile: )

Fantastic game, guys! A lot of fun, nice to look at and great effects. I wished it had more songs (if you detect the bps automatically: any chance of an option to import custom music?). Also the main menu song is the best song in the game imo, I was a little sad that I couldn't play a level with it :)

Absolutely amazing. The graphics are great and it's got a great feel. I like the idea @Thygrrr about making the player shoot with the beat as well. My only (very small) complaint is that I cannot navigate menus with the controller ;P

If you could check out [my game](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ludum-dare-41-placeholder-1) too I'd appreciate it!

@chriiis88 We experimented with that, but we need the exact BPM and we couldn't find/make a reliable way to detect that automatically :<

Good music that fits with the game, simple art style but very colourful, also the interface is amazing!

Holly smokes! I'm not exactly a rhythm game genre connoisseur but I've been known to play a game or two of Audiosurf in my day, and I feel like your game is in many ways better. More responsive, more satisfying. I don't know, maybe the genre is saturated, but in my eyes, this little jam gem could easily find its way into my Steam library. Just make a killer original soundtrack, give people the ability to load their own tunes and you have a winner on your hands. I enjoyed my time with Rhythm Overdrive immensely, it's a really great game.

Stuff of legends. Congratulations on the game!

Wow, how did you programmed the sync with the music??? It's so accurate

Really nice graphics, specially the particle effects going on.
Some constructive criticism, this game is really good like so don't think of this as me being negative towards your game:
Although the enemies move to the rhythm I didn't think it really impacted the gameplay enough to be a gameplay mechanic since you can just hold left click and hope you'll hit them anyway. That and they seem to move left or right randomly on beat so it's not something you can predict too well, so might as well hold left click all the time. So to me, it didn't feel like a rhythm game, just a game where the enemies dance to the music in a really awesome way. I feel like if rhythm was implemented to the shooting more, or impacted the overall gameplay more, then it would be more fun. Even having the ship constrained to grid movement rather than having it floaty might also help that "punchy" precise feeling from rhythm games, but not sure about that idea tbh.
This is being super picky like, great job on this game overall, the overall polish is insanely high quality.

@dragojt Its moderately accurate... main menu goes out of sync after 1 or 2 loops.

They probably just mapped BPM from the track to their animator. Well done, a typical case of "good enough wins the jam!"

oh not, it's like my game but better :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: (OK not really but similar ideas, in case you are curious: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/super-hyperspace-rythm-plus-ultra), I liked the visual design, really pretty to look at.

@Dragojt @Thygrrr We have a script that sends an event for every beat and is synced with the audio clock so that it's always in sync. We only need to set the BPM for each song and the rest is automatic ! On the menu the BPM is always the one of the background song so it doesn't update when you preview the songs :<

@Blobinet Very Nice!

This is a great fun and awesome looking game. The particle effects you used are amazing. The music is really good. The gameplay is really fun too. I was expecting that you move or shoot with the beat but looks like it's the enemies that goes with the beat. Either way your implementations of the game and theme is great. Thanks for making a great entry.

The game looks and plays amazingly, but in my opinion, it doesn't really have a mix between two incompatible genres-it feels more like a shoot-em up with a gimmick. The game is extremely well polished though. Good stuff.

That's an awesome game, very nice polished and the art is very cool. Deserve to win this Ludum Dare.

Superb game ! Can win this Ludum Dare !

Nice Game ! <3

Amazing games guys ! Very polished for a jam : D Loved the graphic and the general mood, the game is really fluid and the combo system is awesome

Would definitely some more feedbacks on Chorus compared to Verse part of the musics. Maybe add some ennemis or some challenge when music go to the climax. But you got my 4.5/5

The only drawback i would find is the use of known tracks. It would be an interesting game for lot of music designers !


Check our game ! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/blocksnblaster-1

Just... Wow...

Pity there's no Linux support, would've liked to have try this, looks fun. :(

Visually looks great and eye catching. But I expected more variative gameplay =(
Too less enemy types, game not challanging for me.

Thanks you all for your feedback !

@Blinkenlights I'm sorry we didn't take the time to make a linux build. We are not used to it; but someone managed to play the game with Wine on Linux, you should try if you use it ^^

@saintheiser We'd love to add new ennemies, and a lot of more weapons ! It was just really hard to implement more content while optimize it and balance it in 72h :c

@HPMNK Unfortunately, we have no sound designer in our promo :c

@Maxime Catel I can fully relate to that, porting isn't easy, especially if you're doing it on scratch from a Windows machine. I would if I knew how, I'm an absolute noob when it comes to Wine I'm afraid. Where you using an engine?

@maxime-catel Yeah, time is money. But start already have begining =)

I'll love to play this game more polished!

Well polished, and a lot of fun to play :) I think there should either be a reason why you shouldnt keep on shooting all the time, or you shooting is just automatic. Were did you get the music from? Its pretty good ^^

@Blinkenlights Yeah, we used Unity, and I know there are some options to build for Linux, but I never used it. For the next Jam, we'll try to build for Linux and Mac ^^

@saintheiser Hehe, we plan to upgrade this game during this summer, so maybe one day a bigger and better version will come out ! ;p

@BlueMirror Thanks ! Glad you enjoyed the game ! That's true, our base concept is quite incomplete, and we need to implement features & new gameplay elements, like an utility to stop shooting etc..

For the musics, we just chose songs that we like, and we tried to use not so well-known musics :p

~sorry for those english mistakes~

@Maxime Catel Oh, well you have no excuses then! XD It's dead easy on Unity! But thanks anyhow, looking forward to the next Jam!

Compared to other shmups, this disallows spamming of bullets for a good reason: not destroying the rhythm.

Fun to play, cool graphics and awesome music.
A bit on the easy side though but great overall.

The graphics are what caught my eye, well done! There are some design problems, though. I would suggest more aspects of the game being tied to the rhythm like shooting (for combos) and player movement (for more points). Nice game nonetheless. You should be proud!

I really liked it, you have a solid base for a complete game, fix what people suggested in the comments and go for it guys ! 😁

MY GOD THE JUICE IS REAL! Holy crap what an amazing game, the controls are tight, the music is great, the vfx are amazing and the visual style is out of this world.

I think you can do a lot more with the music and this game format, but taking the limited amount of time into account this is just right,hitting the right spots to show what could be!

I wasn't too big a fan of the green weapon fanning back and forth, but maybe that's just a case of balancing or simply straightening it out, I do understand why it happens, but perhaps it's more suited for a different weapon.

Now don't you dare drop this and not do anything with this, this has so much potential! The game as it is now is a great start and proof of concept! But now it's time to step it up to the next level! Let us choose our own music, adjust the level based on the music, enemies, upgrades, maybe even a shop, etc!

This game could sit right up there next to Audiosurf and Beat Hazard! Awesome work!

This game has amaaazziingg graphics!!!! And the music was awesome too. I love how the enemies move at the rythm of the music, very very good!

This feels like a full on steam game. It is really fun to play and just great to look at.

Really nice visual style, although sometimes I found all the shininess gets a bit in the way of trying to see whats actually happening, gameplay was fun in the classic shoot em up style.

It was pretty nice to play overall, it had great music, graphics, effects, and good polish, but I do have some problems. First off there are some parts of combat that aren't as satisfying as usual, for example killing enemies, or for that mater hitting them does not really feel like the player is doing damage, and part of that is most likely for the hitting, there isn't a visual indication, and for both killing and hitting there isn't much of a satisfying sound to it. Overall though, as I said this was a great game that I really enjoyed playing, and I hope you keep making to improve.

_So..._ **when can I put this on my Steam wishlist?!** This was amazing! I wish you could of heard the joyous, maniacal laughter I involuntarily emitted while dancing in my seat playing this game. It's an EDM, 80's, laser, firework, techno-magic, shooter, EXTRAVAGANZA! The graphics are beautiful, the music choices were great (though I prefer the instrumentals, the last song wasn't my thing,) and the execution was just about PERFECT!
***Get some songs licensed, build some levels, throw in some new mechanics and features and call it a day!***

That said, a few requests for the future:
1. The ability to import our own music. I know games have done this before, but give us a level editor and let us go nuts!
2. I'd love it if the enemies moved EXTRA whenever there were extra drum beats or other rhythmic elements... though that might increase difficulty.
3. I'd love it if the bullet firing was on some fraction of the beat. Like super fast laser hi-hats.

Fun game! Amazing visual style!

Thank you all for the awesome feedback !

@Densin Yeah, the weapon is aiming left & right because if it was firing straight it would be really underpowered. We tried that :p (and we plan to make a vertical slice of a more complete version of the game !)

@TheLucky Good point here. We need to implement more visual / audio feedback for the player, and make some ennemies react to the shooting impacts. With all of that, it will be even more satisfying for the player ^^

@funisfun8 Thanks ! I'm extremely glad that you enjoyed the game ! I agree with you for the instrumental songs. Lyrics are not my favorite, and we'll try to use less lyrics-based songs for the more advanced version. We also have a lot of ideas about new mechanics, ennemies, weapons, bosses, etc.. :p

Unfortunately, here is our biggest problem : We tried to find a way to let the players use their custom musics, but our game is too BPM dependent (the walls, the ennemies, and the background are always bumping at the perfect timing of the song's BPM); however, games like Audiosurf & Beat Hazard are more approximative about that. They are using some kind of script that detects kicks & snares, and create pickups & obstacles based on the song notes but not at every beat (Audiosurf), or ennemies and approximative glow amplifyer, exactly like the visuals of music videos on youtube, you know (Beat Hazard), but these games are not BPM perfect. In our case, we already tried to use a script like that, but the walls & background were desynchronized, or were bumping at every peak in the audio source (horrible), and it was not precise. It's a really big problem, and after some researches, we realized that creating an algorithm to calculate BPM of custom songs is really complex, and depends of the sampling of the audio source, etc.. ( [look at this](http://mziccard.me/2015/05/28/beats-detection-algorithms-1/) )

For now, we plan to make a version of the game with a lot of tracks (like a Guitar Hero game), and eventually make some kind of big update with custom tracks later ^^ Trust me, it was a really hard decision to make. The other solution was to change the entire game, and we don't want that.

About your 2nd request, we plan to make some "drop multiplier" whenever the song is becoming intense, so the ennemies could be faster, and spawn more :p (also, some new game influencers mechanics are gonna be implemented).

And finally, we already tried to make the bullets of the player follow the beat; it would work if our game has only 1 weapon, but there will be more, so it will be hard to diversify weapons while constrain them to fire on the beat (or a multiplier of the beat), but nothing is definitive right now :p

Thank you again everybody, and sorry for those english mistakes~

This game has a great potential, if not the greatest of the jam.
Graphics perfectly feets the genre, and is pretty much innovative for a shmup. (and i really like and play shmups)
I hope you'll continue development :)
Idea : some time enemy ships were at the same position. I thought it could be a nice idea if some enemies could split in two.
i never tried to write script about music analysis, but as a musician who likes to record my music, i can tell you that most songs have a constant BPM, except in metal. my first approach to calculate the BPM would be to try 120 bpm first, as it probably is the most used bpm, find the beginning of the song, search if it matches with kicks and snares, if not try 140 and so on 160 180 220. At least it should work with synthwave, dubstep, electronic music in general. Or you could use some midi/guitar pro database. That's just an idea but if it can help ^^
Well, good luck for the future development :)

@Maxime Catel What I meant is you could give us a level editor. Many people would be willing to manually input a BPM. You could even give a tempo tapper to use. Then, we could listen through the song and set up sections of different intensity for enemy generation(or different depending on how it works behind the scenes.)

I totally get what you mean about detecting the BPM, every game I've played that claims to detect rhythm is never quite right and it pulls you out of the experience. Hence, why I suggested you should give a manual level editor that could export some sort of text file to be paired with different custom songs(you don't want to be responsible for people distributing music, that would be a legal nightmare.)

@funisfun8 That's a nice idea. Yesterday we were thinking about the fact that manually input the BPM could be quite annoying, especially if you have to search it on some weird websites (we even searched a way to import soundcloud/spotify data, but the APIs are limited). The tempo tapper could fit in that case; however, with custom imported songs, it will be difficult to implement some online leaderboards. I think we'll keep the leaderboards for the included official tracks.

I'll discuss with the devs if it's possible to make a fully working level editor, with some crazy features :p Some kind of "track visualizer", that can allow players ( and us ) to customize and map songs, with editable values etc..

And of course, no music sharing, we don't want any legal problems ^^

@mowztouch I think those databases are licensed, or really hard to export to a game. Your idea about an analyzer script is interesting, but it will need to analyze the audio file, and with differents audio file formats, samples (44100, 48000,..) it will become really hard to code relatively fast..
I really think that's possible, but for now, we'll try to find some simpler solutions :p

Thanks for the feedback !

Man! That's a fantastic game! It looks like finished product, I am not even joking. Like seriously, add more levels, make first levels a bit shorter and sell it through steam. Absolutely stunning level of production, I was not ready for this. Definitely most fun game I played this jam!

Amazing entry! The degree of polish is not far from released products, and I had a lot of fun. Shmups+rhythm-based games can be really flow-inducing if done right, and this one has potential. A bit more content in terms of enemies and/or weapon upgrades and there it goes! :)

Congrats!

I also went with a rhythm-based game, but took a more manual approach to mark the significant beats instead of real detection, which is quite tricky to pull off (also, I was on my own, so I couldn't afford to spend a lot of time on a realistic system). For a given song with set BPM I used a cue sheet linked to a song that tracks what beats are important. (Ideally, there could be different sheets per song to support different difficulty levels or stuff like that).

Amazing graphics, cool music, i couldn't feel synchronization between the game with the rhythm, sometimes but not whole level.
Overall, it's cool game.

Really cool game, I just wish there were more things synchronized with the music. Rad graphics!

Yo!
This game was awesome! My only real complaint is that it was too easy. I felt like that when I thought you had to kill everything, then even more so when I realised you could let enemies pass. The main difficulty came from RNGesus not dropping power ups for nearly the whole level, which happened to me a couple of times. Anyway, I still really enjoyed it, the graphics are clean and exciting, the sound effects are fitting and the music (especially the third track) was really good. I went back and played level 3 a bunch, because I was enjoying the music (and it presented the most challenge) so much. Thanks for including controller support too. Great game, hope you take it further.

I found the game very fun and good to play, but I found it easy, I played all the phases and did not see any difference. I think a boss at the end would be interesting, and enemies with different weapons would also make it more difficult. Congratulations on the game, for the small work time was fantastic.

I left my rating of your game, if you can leave your feedback in our game, Witch's Escape.

I hope you continue with the project.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape

A really great game. Had a lot of fun playing it. The music, the graphics, the colors used. Everything feels very pro and it was feeling like a real game you could buy. Well done on it :)

Nice. I think i need to rest my eyes for a bit now. So many colors. So much neon.

Beautiful graphics, and so polished. I'm blown away that this was a weekend's work.